Throughout 2001 countries continued to work toward a common understanding of international law, particularly on the issue of “universal jurisdiction,” the concept that war criminals may be punished anywhere regardless of where or against whom they committed their crimes. The September terrorist attacks in the United States raised critical questions for international law, including how terrorists should be punished and what the rules were for taking action against countries alleged to have harboured those responsible.

Peru continued to seek the extradition of former president Alberto Fujimori, who was living in exile in Japan. Fujimori was accused of abandonment of his office, dereliction of duty in the wake of corruption scandals, and failure to appear for court hearings. Japan refused to extradite Fujimori and said the case would be handled according to Japanese domestic law. Chile’s former dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, who faced allegations of war crimes committed during his tenure, was found medically unfit to stand trial.

The collision of a Chinese fighter jet with an American surveillance jet caused the American plane to land on Chinese soil in distress, while the Chinese aircraft was lost at sea. The U.S. questioned whether the Chinese had the right to board the downed American plane, hold its crew, and remove equipment from the plane, all of which the Chinese did. Although there was no international law directly applicable to such a situation, the U.S. raised two legal points: first, the U.S. plane had not overflown China’s 19-km (12-mi) recognized territorial seas and therefore did not violate China’s sovereignty or break international law, and, second, customary international law recognizes that a ship in distress can enter a harbour unannounced; furthermore, a foreign military ship in port is not subject to the jurisdiction of the port state. These laws could be interpreted to cover aircraft as well as ships. Chinese authorities claimed that since the aircraft had no right to be on Chinese territory, it was not immune to being searched.

The International Court of Justice

In July the International Court of Justice (ICJ) found that the U.S. had breached its obligations to Germany under Article 36 of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations. Walter LaGrand, a German national, was sentenced to death for his involvement in a 1982 murder in Arizona. The night before the execution, Germany brought suit in the ICJ. Germany argued that LaGrand had not been informed of his rights under the Vienna Convention, under which he could have notified the German consulate of his arrest and incarceration. Despite the ICJ’s issuance of a “provisional measure of protection,” LaGrand was executed as scheduled. The court held that the U.S. violated the convention’s requirements. It determined that individual rights in one’s nation of origin might be invoked in the World Court when the individual was being detained in another country.

The principality of Liechtenstein brought suit in the ICJ against Germany, claiming that Germany had improperly disposed of property belonging to Liechtenstein. After World War II, Czechoslovakia, one of the Allies, seized property without compensation in defeated Germany, including some objects owned by Liechtensteiners. Subsequently, in 1952 Germany and Liechtenstein agreed that although Germany had given up the right to pursue the recovery of its own goods, those objects belonging to Liechtenstein had been illegally taken by Czechoslovakia. When in 1991 a Czechoslovak museum sent to Germany on loan a painting that was among those claimed by Liechtenstein, that principality’s leader, Prince Hans Adam II, sued the Germans, claiming that the painting had been illegally seized in 1945 and that Germany should relinquish it. The German courts disagreed, finding that the painting was properly seized German property; it was later returned to the Czech Republic. The ICJ had not reached a decision as of year’s end.

Universal Jurisdiction

In June a Belgian jury sentenced two nuns and two men to jail terms from 12 to 20 years for crimes committed during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. A 1993 Belgian law gave its courts jurisdiction over violations of the Geneva Conventions regardless of where the crimes were committed, by whom, or against whom. The Geneva Conventions call for the humane treatment of noncombatants, and they prohibit murder, mutilation, and cruel or degrading treatment. This was the first jury trial to address violations of international humanitarian law that occurred in another country. A Belgian court delayed until November a preliminary hearing to determine whether that country had jurisdiction to bring charges against Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon (seeBiographies) for his role in a 1982 Palestinian massacre. The court’s decision to hear arguments on the case prompted outrage from some countries and caused the Belgian government to consider exempting sitting prime ministers and presidents from the reach of the 1993 law. In a similar case, Senegal’s high court ruled that it did not have jurisdiction over Chad’s exiled president Hissène Habré for crimes he committed while in Chad. Habré’s victims spoke of seeking his extradition to Belgium instead. Similarly, a Cuban American group threatened to file suit in Belgian court against Cuban leader Fidel Castro, alleging crimes against humanity.

There were several landmark decisions from the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY). Three ethnic Serbs were convicted on charges of rape and torture for their abuse in 1992 of women in a “rape camp” in Bosnia and Herzegovina. This was the first case to issue convictions for rape as a crime against humanity. In June Serbia surrendered former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic to the ICTY. He would be the first former head of state to stand trial at an international tribunal. Article 7 of the ICTY specifically denies immunity to heads of state. Milosevic was indicted in 1999 on charges of crimes against humanity and war crimes for the killings of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo. He was indicted in October for crimes in Croatia in 1991–92 and in November for crimes in Bosnia in 1992–96. Gen. Radislav Krstic was sentenced to 46 years in prison for his role in the execution of 7,000 unarmed Muslim men and boys near the Bosnian town of Srebrenica in 1995. According to the verdict issued in the case, “ethnic cleansing became genocide.” Former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic and his top general, Ratko Mladic, indicted by the tribunal on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity, were still fugitives, as were many others. In October, after six years of refusing to cooperate, the Bosnian Serb parliament passed a law supporting the ICTY and calling for the arrest of war-crimes suspects living in Republika Srpska (Serb Republic).

Terrorism

A Scottish court found a Libyan, ʿAbd al-Baset al-Megrahi, guilty of the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scot., in 1988. A second Libyan was acquitted, and al-Megrahi planned to appeal. The court placed responsibility for the bombing on Libya but did not specify who might have been involved. An American federal grand jury indicted 14 men (13 Saudi nationals) in connection with the 1996 bombing of the U.S. military barracks in Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia protested, claiming that the U.S. did not have the jurisdiction to prosecute a crime that occurred on Saudi territory, nor did it have the right to prosecute Saudi nationals. Although universal jurisdiction had been recognized for war crimes and genocide, it was less accepted for acts of terrorism. The September 11 terrorist attacks in the U.S. could cause that to change, however. On September 28 the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 1373, which was legally binding on all members and called for states to take measures to combat terrorism, including bringing terrorists to justice.

Most international law concerned interstate disputes and had little to do with individuals. Thus, because Osama bin Laden (seeBiographies), the prime suspect in the terrorist attacks, was not the representative of any state, charges against him could not be brought in the ICJ. The proper forum would have been the International Criminal Court, but the act enabling the ICC had not been ratified by the requisite number of countries— the U.S. being among the nonratifiers. What constituted a legal response to the September attacks was also moot. Were the attacks an act of war? Was a declaration of war required in order to respond with military force?

On October 18 a New York judge handed down life sentences to three foreigners and a naturalized American found guilty of involvement in the 1998 attacks on the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Bin Laden was linked to these attacks as well, but he and 12 others indicted for the bombings remained at large.

Court Decisions

Between Oct. 2, 2000, and June 28, 2001, the United States Supreme Court decided 79 cases. While the term would be forever remembered for Bush v. Gore, a number of other significant cases also attracted attention. Statistically, if not rhetorically, the term ranked as the most divisive since the current composition of the court was established in 1994. In one-third of the cases, the court ruled 5–4; in the area of civil rights, the “faction-fraction” rose to two-thirds. Not surprisingly, many of the most divisive cases raised salient constitutional questions, and the court’s answers to them clarified not only the tenuous status of individual rights but patterns of judicial decision making as well. This was especially true in the fields of civil rights, civil liberties, and criminal law.

The cases of Alexander v. Sandoval,Board of Trustees of the University of Alabama v. Garrett, and Easley (formerly Hunt) v. Cromartie exemplified the dividing line in civil rights jurisprudence. In the first pair of cases, the philosophical split was identical: Justices William Rehnquist, Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, Sandra Day O’Connor, and Clarence Thomas formed the conservative majority, with the more liberal Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, John Paul Stevens, and David Souter constituting the minority.

Alexander v. Sandoval involved a challenge to Alabama’s English-only driver’s license examinations. Arguing that Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and related federal regulations prohibiting discrimination in federally funded programs were never intended to permit or award lawsuits filed by private individuals, Scalia held that there is no private cause of action to enforce such regulations. In the second Alabama-based case, the court ruled that the states are immune from lawsuits claiming discrimination under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Just as the former case limited the application of federal law owing to a narrow interpretation of congressional intent, the latter restricted congressional authority in the area of equal protection, reaffirming a stellar commitment to a state-centred theory of federalism. The notable exception to this trend was established in the case of PGA Tour, Inc. v. Martin. By a vote of 7–2, the court ruled that Casey Martin, a professional golfer with diminished ambulatory ability, had a legal right under the Disabilities Act to use a golf cart during the Professional Golfers’ Association of America (PGA) tour. Despite the PGA’s insistence that such a decision would give Martin an unfair advantage, the court ruled that the use of a cart constituted a reasonable accommodation of the petitioner’s disability.

In the area where civil rights, civil liberties, and electoral politics converged, the Supreme Court addressed two important cases. In Easley v. Cromartie, the minority in Alexander and University of Alabama gained the support of Justice O’Connor, producing the one-vote margin necessary to uphold the configuration of North Carolina’s 12th Congressional District. In ruling that the district, which was 47% black, was crafted through a bipartisan effort and not according to racial identity, the level of suspicion historically associated with apparently race-based districts was relaxed enough to facilitate a judicial inclusion of intent and method, rather than simply racial composition. The inclusion of O’Connor in this case indicated a unique flexibility in terms of both the law and the justice’s own position. Since her appointment O’Connor had been an opponent of presumably race-based districting, and the cases were decided along those relatively rigid lines. By taking into consideration other variables—the source, method, and motives of redistricting—a new jurisprudential flexibility emerged.

In the related field of campaign finance, the same majority upheld limitations on coordinated campaign expenditures. The court held in Federal Election Commission v. Colorado Republican Federal Campaign Committee that party expenditures were substantively different from individual expenditures and therefore ineligible for the full First Amendment protection offered to citizens. Also, by rejecting party exemptions, the court avoided setting a standard that could conceivably have facilitated the circumvention of other campaign finance rules and regulations.

Although political parties were limited in the expression of support they may give, the speech and actions of attorneys employed by a government corporation may not be subjected to congressional restrictions. Compatible with its philosophy of limited congressional authority, the court ruled in the consolidated cases of Legal Services Corporation v. Velazquez and United States v. Velazquez that a 1996 provision limiting various modes of conduct including, but not limited to, lobbying, class-action litigation, immigrant representation, and welfare reform violated the First Amendment rights of the attorneys and their clients.

In Good News Club v. Milford Central School, the court revisited the controversial issue of speech rights and religious liberty in public schools. Arguing that the school’s attempt to deny Christian groups access to facilities for religious instruction amounted to viewpoint discrimination, the court held that public schools must provide the same after-hours privileges for religious organizations as they do for nonreligious organizations. Because the school itself was not sponsoring or requiring religious instruction, the establishment clause was not violated.

In the area of criminal law, the court decided at least four major Fourth Amendment cases: Illinois v. McArthur,Atwater v. City of Lago Vista,Kyllo v. United States, and Ferguson v. City of Charleston. The Illinois and Atwater cases were similar in that they involved police conduct relating to the execution of warrants and arrests. In Illinois v. McArthur, the court ruled that the Fourth Amendment was not violated when police, while awaiting a warrant to search property for evidence of a controlled dangerous substance, prohibited a man from entering his home. Because police had probable cause to believe the home contained evidence of a crime, because of the reasonable suspicion that such evidence would be destroyed by the suspect if he was allowed to enter the home, and because there was a minimal intrusion into the man’s personal privacy, the warrantless seizure was considered constitutionally permissible.

Atwater v. City of Lago Vista involved the related question of warrantless arrests. Writing for the court, Justice Souter argued that the Fourth Amendment does not forbid warrantless arrests for minor criminal offenses. The offense in this case was the failure of an adult driver to secure herself and her children with safety belts while in an automobile. Despite competing claims regarding the applicability of common-law traditions and the presumed severity of the penalty, there simply is no constitutional prohibition of the legal action in question.

Kyllo v. United States and Ferguson v. City of Charleston both involved questions of illegal searches—the former involving a home, the latter involving a person. In Kyllo v. United States, the court ruled that police use of thermal imaging devices aimed at a private residence constituted an unconstitutional search of private property. According to Justice Scalia, using the device to detect heat and light necessary for growing marijuana amounted to a search under the Fourth Amendment, which would have required a warrant. In the Ferguson case, the court was asked to determine whether a hospital’s policy of testing for drug use and providing such results to police in order to deter pregnant women from using cocaine violated the generally recognized prohibition of warrantless nonconsensual searches. Striking down the law, Stevens wrote that the policy, which emanated from a program designed at the height of the “crack babies” epidemic and ultimately resulted in the use of medical procedures to alert police to criminal conduct, was unconstitutional.

In Whitman v. American Trucking Associations, Inc., which was proclaimed by the New York Times to be “the most important regulatory ruling” of the term, the court unanimously defended the Clean Air Act against a legal challenge by the ATA. The legal challenge was two-pronged: to argue that the Environmental Protection Agency’s power was derived from an unconstitutional delegation of legislative authority to an administrative agency and that cost-benefit analysis should be part of the calculus for developing environmental standards. The court rejected both claims, finding that public-health matters should constitute the sole determinant of new clean-air standards.

The court’s 2001–02 term could well be remembered for the manner in which the institution began its session in October: with the unprecedented necessity of acknowledging the impact of terrorism on American soil in the wake of the September 11 attacks and, for the first time since the completion of the Supreme Court building, holding its session outside the historic structure. The dramatic events relating to war and conflict had an immediate impact on the operation, if not the judgment, of the court—so much so, in fact, that one of the court’s first orders of business, upholding the prohibition of former president Bill Clinton’s privilege of practicing law before the bench, went largely unnoticed.

Crime

Terrorism

On Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks of unprecedented savagery and destruction were launched against the United States. In a coordinated assault terrorists simultaneously hijacked four commercial airliners flying from Newark, N.J., Boston, Mass., and Washington, D.C. Two of the planes were then flown into the twin towers of the World Trade Center (WTC) in New York City, while a third plowed into the country’s military nerve centre, the Pentagon, outside Washington, D.C. The fourth aircraft crashed into a field in Pennsylvania, apparently after passengers struggled to overpower the hijackers following news received over their cell phones of what had just occurred in New York. This aircraft was believed to have been targeted to fly into either the White House or the U.S. Capitol building in Washington. (SeeSpecial Report.)

More than 3,000 persons were thought to have perished during the course of these attacks, most having been buried amid the rubble of the WTC towers, which collapsed about one hour after being struck. The death toll made this the deadliest single day of violent action against the U.S. since the American Civil War, exceeding the 2,403 deaths in Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. In the wake of the September 11 attacks, Pres. George W. Bush declared the U.S. to be “at war” with international terrorism and readied the nation for military retaliation against the perpetrators of the assault. While no terrorist group made immediate claim to have assisted the 19 hijackers identified by the FBI as having been aboard the doomed flights, a massive criminal investigation launched in the U.S. and abroad garnered compelling evidence that the attacks were the work of al-Qaeda (“the Base”), a network of Islamic terrorist organizations led by Saudi-born Osama bin Laden. (SeeBiographies.) Al-Qaeda, according to extensive testimony given at a number of highly publicized terrorist trials in the U.S. during recent years, was a well-organized and sophisticated body that acted as a facilitator and coordinator of terrorist activities in many countries. Al-Qaeda was known to support at least four elite training camps in Afghanistan for its adherents, where instruction was given in bomb making, sabotage, intelligence gathering, abduction, hijacking, and related terrorist activities. When conducting an operation like the attacks upon two U.S. embassies in East Africa in August 1998, al-Qaeda used teams composed of long-term “sleepers,” who had been resident in a country for years, as well as “cleanskins,” who had never been involved in an operation before. It was believed that Bin Laden and his aides adopted a similar strategy when planning and executing the September 11 assault from their shadowy base within Afghanistan, where they continued to be given sanctuary by that nation’s extremist Islamic regime, the Taliban. Despite the imposition upon Afghanistan of severe international sanctions and armed intervention by the U.S. and its allies, the Taliban refused to meet demands that they cease their support for al-Qaeda and hand over Bin Laden and his associates to face justice.

The level of international support and assistance offered to the U.S. in responding to the events of September 11 was demonstrated by NATO, which declared that the attacks were against the alliance as a whole. On October 7 U.S.-led military strikes commenced against a range of targets within Afghanistan, including suspected terrorist bases. Shortly after the attacks began, a prerecorded message from Bin Laden, speaking from an undisclosed location, was broadcast by the Qatar-based satellite TV network Al-Jazeera to millions of television screens around the world. During the broadcast Bin Laden implicitly admitted his involvement in the September 11 assault, called upon Muslims to engage in a holy war against the U.S., and suggested that his actions were in part a response to Israeli reprisals against Palestinians.

Drug Trafficking

As required under U.S. law, President Bush delivered to Congress in March a report certifying which governments of the major drug-producing countries and drug-transit countries had cooperated fully with the U.S., or taken adequate steps on their own, to curb drug use and trafficking. Failure to gain certification made a government ineligible for most forms of U.S. assistance. U.S. drug-enforcement officials claimed that the certification process resulted in certain countries’ eradicating drug crops, capturing seemingly elusive drug barons, and taking other actions to ensure that they met the deadline set each year to receive a favourable presidential ruling. Two countries, Afghanistan and Myanmar (Burma), were denied certification in 2001. U.S. officials observed that during 2000 the cultivation of the opium poppy in Afghanistan increased by 25% and that the country accounted for about 72% of the global supply. Earlier in the year, however, there had been credible reports of decreased poppy cultivation in Taliban-controlled areas. Large opiate stockpiles remained in the country, and drug trafficking continued unabated from Afghanistan to Europe and other regions of the world.

On April 20 an American missionary, Veronica Bowers, and her seven-month-old daughter were killed when the light aircraft in which they were flying was shot down by a Peruvian air force fighter plane in the mistaken belief that it was engaged in a drug-trafficking operation. The incident prompted an extensive examination by the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence of a six-year-old agreement between the U.S. and Peru under which U.S. assistance was provided in tracking drug smugglers. At the time of the shooting down of the missionaries’ aircraft, it was under the surveillance of a U.S. tracking plane flown under CIA contract. As a result of the mistaken attack, the U.S. suspended all of its drug-surveillance flights in Central and South America while officials reassessed the rules and procedures they followed.

Murder and Other Violence

Preliminary figures released in May from the FBI’s nationwide Uniform Crime Reporting Program indicated that in 2000 the Crime Index, comprising murder, forcible rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny, theft, and motor-vehicle theft, remained relatively unchanged from 1999. This was the first time in eight years that a decline had not been reported in the number of serious crimes in the U.S. Experts and law-enforcement officials had long cautioned that the crime rate could not drop indefinitely, and this FBI report tended to confirm that the trend had run its course. In the past a large increase or decrease in homicide, or in crime in the biggest cities, had tended to predict significant fluctuations in general rates of serious crime. No indicators of this type were contained in the 2000 figures.

On March 5, in a tragic repeat of school shootings in the past several years that had traumatized rural and suburban communities in the U.S., a 15-year-old high-school freshman, Charles Andrew Williams, killed two fellow students and wounded 13 others at Santana High School in Santee, a suburb of San Diego, Calif. The shooting was the worst episode of school violence since the mass slayings in April 1999 at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo.

On June 8, in an incident that shocked the entire nation of Japan, a knife-wielding man burst into an elementary school in Ikeda and stabbed to death eight children—seven second-grade girls and one first-grade boy—and also seriously wounded six more students and a teacher. Police arrested Mamoru Takuma, a 37-year-old who had a history of mental illness.

War Crimes

Slobodan Milosevic, the past president of Yugoslavia, became the first former head of state to sit in a defendant’s dock facing charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity. On July 3 Milosevic made his initial appearance before the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague following his dramatic nighttime transfer from a Belgrade prison on June 28. Milosevic, who had been placed under arrest by the Yugoslav government on April 1 on unrelated corruption charges, remained defiant before the international tribunal and challenged its legitimacy to place him on trial. Experts predicted that the proceedings against Milosevic could last for years and that his testimony could embarrass a number of Western leaders who had negotiated and dealt with him for much of his period in office. By surrendering Milosevic to the international tribunal, the Yugoslav government received immediate pledges of substantial aid from the U.S. and other nations to assist in rebuilding its shattered economy.

White-Collar Crime, Corruption, and Fraud

“A worldwide corruption crisis” was identified by Transparency International (TI), a Berlin-based nongovernmental organization established to expose and prevent corruption. Releasing its annual Corruption Perceptions Index in June, TI ranked 91 countries on a 10-point scale. A high score, indicating very low levels of perceived corruption, was obtained by some of the world’s richest nations—Finland, Denmark, New Zealand, Iceland, Singapore, and Sweden. In contrast, low scores were recorded by some of the world’s poorest countries, with Azerbaijan, Bolivia, Cameroon, Kenya, Indonesia, Uganda, Nigeria, and Bangladesh ranked at the bottom of the list. TI’s chairman said that the index illustrated once more “the vicious circle of poverty and corruption” as vast amounts of public funds were squandered and stolen by corrupt governments and their officials.

In the Philippines in January, a wave of public anger against corruption forced Pres. Joseph Estrada from office in a bloodless coup. In April Estrada became the first Philippine president to be jailed on suspicion of corruption. Prosecutors alleged that he had pocketed more than $76 million in tax money and illegal gambling receipts during his two and a half years in office. If convicted of plunder, the most serious charge against him, Estrada faced the possibility of a death sentence or life imprisonment.

Law Enforcement

The FBI came under sustained scrutiny during the year as a result of a number of well-publicized incidents that suggested that failures had occurred in its management and information network. The most damaging and embarrassing revelation came in February when it was announced that a veteran FBI counterintelligence agent, Robert Philip Hanssen, had been arrested and charged with committing espionage by providing highly classified national security information to Russia and the former Soviet Union. At the time of his arrest at a park in Vienna, Va., Hanssen was clandestinely placing a garbage bag containing secret information at a prearranged “dead drop” for pickup by his Russian handlers. Hanssen had previously received large sums of money from the Russians for the information he disclosed to them. In July Hanssen pleaded guilty to 15 counts of having spied for Moscow since 1979. As part of a plea deal, Hanssen was given a sentence of life imprisonment rather than death after he agreed to participate in extensive debriefing with government agents and cooperated truthfully and fully with them. Prosecutors said that Hanssen betrayed nine double agents, including two who were later executed. He also provided Moscow with details of several top-secret communication programs, U.S. nuclear war preparations, and a listening tunnel underneath the Soviet embassy in Washington, D.C. A few weeks before this plea bargain, U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft stated that a review would be conducted of the FBI’s security program to try to ensure that the lapses that allowed Hanssen to operate as a spy would not happen again.